Death and Taxes (and Audits)

It was Benjamin Franklin who said,

…but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

If Mr. Franklin were around today he might append, “and audits” to this famous statement.

Typically, an organization faces an average of three compliance audits per year. Any compliance audit will take two to three months to complete and requires significant time and effort on the part of companies. Compliance audits would generally lead to the identification of:

• Over-deployment of software
• Presence of pirated or cracked software

(Source is link to Ernst and Young White Paper at end of document)We know that being under licensed is a financial risk, however being over licensed is an unnecessary expense. How do we monitor our current license usage within a Maximo environment to optimize costs and compliance? IBM has created the Maximo License Usage Monitor Application (GoTo > Administration > License Usage Monitor) which is available in Maximo 7.6.0.6+ to address these important business concerns.

The License Usage Monitor application is used to monitor your usage of Maximo licenses. You can use this information to determine whether your organization is paying too much for unused licenses, or does not currently have sufficient license entitlement.

Benefits of License Usage Monitor application

• Obtain clear understanding of which users qualify for each Maximo license
• Optimize license’s usage
• Save money by quickly identifying under or overuse of purchased Maximo licenses
• Prepare for IBM Audits

The License Usage Monitor Application can be used to display your current license usage on a dashboard or Start Center for easy license monitoring, as the graphic below demonstrates:

To enable license monitoring, you must complete the following tasks:

• Create license records;
• Define security groups that conform to the available permissions for a given License;
• Configure and enable the License Usage Monitor crontasks;
• Optionally, you can assign licenses to users, for example, assigning authorized licenses to system administrators.

The Licensing Monitoring Application consists of 3 application tabs as seen below:

Standard IBM Maximo license templates are available for each Maximo license type. The standard Maximo license definitions can be updated to include your custom Maximo application and features by adding them to each license record. When modifying the OOB licenses, it is important to understand how each Maximo license is defined by IBM to make sure your definitions are still in compliance with IBM’s rules.

Keep in mind that the License Usage Monitor will only identify users who match one of the purchased licenses definitions. Any user that does not qualify for association to a license in this manner can be identified, again for compliance risk and proper license purchasing, using a simple Maximo query.

If your organization is large enough to have an IBM Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) you might want to know if you do not fit the standard license model, and then how to account for it in your ELA.

The License Usage Monitor can easily help to make sure that your software license plan is not just without risk, but without waste. https://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/ey-overview-challenges-and-remedies-of-software-license-compliance-new/$FILE/ey-overview-challenges-and-remedies-of-software-license-compliance.pdf